Here’s a shot of unconventional wisdom: good times lay ahead!

This is a column about what I want to believe: namely, that the ominous economic headwinds against which the global economic order is currently flailing will be followed by a blissful era of expanding business activity, productivity and returns on capital.

Now I want to stress at the outset that nobody would ever call me a congenital optimist. No ‘glass half-full’ Pollyanna am I!

Indeed, as I write this month’s column, the news is filled with note of 240,000 luckless folks who lost their jobs last month (experts were expecting a ‘mere’ 200,000). The 6.5 percent rate of unemployment is the highest in well over a decade. 

The IMF is forecasting an across-the-board contraction of the industrial economies, something that hasn’t occurred since the 1940s! “Financial stress is likely to be deeper and more protracted than envisaged even a month ago,” says its Director of Research.

Lest there be any doubt that the U.S. is dead-center in the eye of the storm, a measure from the Association of American Railroads notes that volume of both carloads and intermodal units (“trailers and containers on flat cars”) in October were down nearly 3 percent from a year earlier. The manufacturing might of the economy is expectedly getting hit-biggest decreases were in motor vehicles (22 percent less) and metal products (16 percent). An unwelcome surprise, however, was grain (down 13 percent)-only a few months ago agriculture was a prospering sector and American farmers were aggressively exporting.

So what’s the deal, where’s this good news going to come from?

The supply chain!

Pressures to maximize efficiency and optimize assets inescapably lead back to considerations of inventory. And fundamental to inventory spend is supply chain management.

Now, I’m not so myopic as to suggest that optimization algorithms and re-configured logistics processes are the ‘key to the kingdom’ that will lead us out of our economic hole. But I do believe that one of the fundamental ways companies will respond to the stress of prolonged contraction is by being forced to conserve and redeploy scarce assets. This will accelerate outsourced transportation and distribution, lend momentum to the growth of 4PLs, provide incentive to invest in demand management tools, and give real urgency to the notion of ‘win-win’ collaboration throughout the value chain.

These thoughts were prompted by a recent conversation with Bill Harrison, CEO of Demand Solutions (providers of forecast management and S&OP tools for SMSEs) and his observation that the tech sector is bringing to market a new wave of modestly priced tools that offer smaller companies the same kind of  full-range functionality once available only to corporate giants.

Necessity will create imperatives to eliminate less than fully productive expenditures. To accelerate inventory turnover. And, most importantly, to conceive new approaches to conventional thinking.   

Many of these moves will occur within the supply chain space, which, I predict, is destined to become a key center of enterprise innovation. And as it does, businesses will correspondingly act differently, smarter, and better. So that, on the other side of this “raging forest fire” (as one observer describes the current havoc), global trade will be poised for an era of more productivity extracted from fewer resources-which is the definition of sustainable prosperity.

Or at least so I hope!